LAS VEGAS – The UFC is on a run of pay-per-view success that is unparalleled in its history. UFC 189 in July, UFC 190 in August and UFC 193 in Australia rank among the best-performing shows in company history.
That is largely due to the star power of headliners Conor McGregor and Ronda Rousey.
On Tuesday, UFC management gave a nod toward the significance of stars in its sport with the announcement of a new state-of-the-art campus on 15 acres in the growing southwest section of town.
Construction on what will be known as the UFC Athlete Health and Performance Center will begin in January and will take 15 months to complete.
The genesis of the facility was a string of injuries the UFC endured over several years that scuttled a slew of its biggest events.
It’s no secret that big-name fighters sell tickets and pay-per-views, and with many of them being forced to pull out of fights, it cost the UFC dearly financially and diluted the product in the cage.
UFC CEO Lorenzo Fertitta wouldn’t discuss the facility’s cost other than to say it was significant. But the fact that company officials felt it was an important enough investment to make shows the value it places on its star performers like Rousey, McGregor and former light heavyweight champion Jon Jones, among others.
“There’s no question about it, when [fighters] get injured and we have to change the main event, or the co-main event, it costs the company money directly in the sense that we’ve already invested millions of dollars in all of the promotional items we put together,” Fertitta told Yahoo Sports. “It’s also that maybe fans not wanting to come to the event or not wanting to buy the pay-per-view and watch on TV after [the card changed]. This is an investment in our business.”
The facility will be more than 30,000 square feet and will include sports medicine facilities, sports science facilities and a performance gym that will include state-of-the-art training facilities.
Fighters will be educated on how to train properly to prevent injuries as well as how to better rehabilitate them. Both Fertitta and Ike Lawrence Epstein, the UFC’s chief operating officer, said they believe a large number of fighters will move to Las Vegas to be able to take advantage of the facility year-round.
Some, Epstein guessed, will hold their entire training camps in it, while others will come in for an assessment or for a portion of training.
UFC president Dana White said representatives from “NFL, NBA, Major League Baseball already looking at what we’re doing out here.”
He said it’s going to improve the quality of the sport because it will make the athletes better and lessen the frequency of injury.
“Let’s say I blow my ACL out,” White said. “What normally happens with us is, we send these guys to the best doctors, they get their ACL done and then they go home. You don’t send Tom Brady home when he blows his ACL out. You make sure the guy is getting rehabbed [properly] because you need him back and you need him healthy. We didn’t do that. We didn’t know. We weren’t educated on it. But now we know.
“These guys would get the surgery done, and then blow off their rehab. They wouldn’t do any of the rehab. Big stars, world champions, wouldn’t do their rehab. Me and Lorenzo would see the guy seven months later and he’d have a leg this big [Holding his fingers two or three inches apart] and the other leg would be this big [holding his hands a foot apart].”
Epstein traveled to England to study the training facility Manchester City FC built, as well as to other places around the world. Manchester City is owned by Flash Entertainment, the Abu Dhabi-based group that owns 10 percent of the UFC, so the company had access to all of the research that went into the construction of that facility.
He said that as the UFC’s success dove during the injury-plagued year, the executives began an analysis.
“We went back and started looking at the decisions we made running this company, and we felt we had the right media deals, we felt we negotiated the right international television deals,” he said. “We went through all these different things and said, ‘We’ve made a lot of good decisions here, so why is our company not performing well?’ And it was pretty obvious that a series of pretty significant injuries just decimated a bunch of our shows.
“That was something, the training of athletes and the recovery [from injury] we had no control over at all. We decided if this is what is negatively affecting our business, things we had no control over, then the answer was to get more involved.”
And thus the idea for the new campus was born. The facility is going to house a vast majority of the company’s 400 employees and will include extensive production facilities as well as a media center.
The UFC will hold news conferences and fighter workouts on its campus and have a space for media to work after such events.
But the centerpiece is the performance center. If it can make a difference in keeping fighters healthy or reducing their time out of competition, it will be a major boon to all sides and will pay for itself eventually.
Time will tell how the fighters respond and, further, if the results are as significant as UFC officials believe they will be.
Fertitta conceded that money is always going to be the No. 1 differentiator in terms of signing fighters or losing them to competitors as free agents. But he said he believes the facilities, which no other fight promoter has anything remotely close to, can be a differentiator.
It is, Epstein said, an effort to find a way to make the athletes better while at the same time reducing the risks they face to their bodies. He pointed to the Dartmouth football team’s use of electronic tackling dummies in a bid to prevent concussions in practice as an innovative approach the UFC wants to adopt.
He said athletes will be able to get functional assessments where they will learn that they are susceptible, say, to a left knee injury and then how to strengthen that area to prevent it.
“The other thing we’re hoping is that this will also change the way guys train,” he said. “Because getting away from lots of sparring and more into lots of functional training can make you absolutely ready to go when the actual event takes place.
“If you’re a freshman at Dartmouth, you’ll never tackle one of your teammates. They use those tackling dummies, and that’s a great and innovative thing they’re doing to prevent a serious injury concern. That’s kind of the same thing for us.”
UFC flyweight Joseph Benavidez attended the groundbreaking and said he is excited by the prospect of the facility.
He said the level of athlete in the UFC is vastly higher than it was when he joined and he thinks a facility like the company is building will only further increase that.
“Kids used to want to grow up to be football players and basketball players, but this kind of commitment to MMA fighters will help change that and make a lot of the kids want to grow up to be fighters,” he said. “The UFC is a global monster and this facility is going to be the first of its kind for fighters.
“It’s going to be great for training and rehabilitation, but it’s also about reaching peak performance and that’s amazing. It’s going to help us as fighters fine-tune and take things to the next level.”
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